Center For Inquiry

POINT OF INQUIRY: SKEPTICAL INQUIRY

Anxiety about loneliness is a common feature of modern societies. Today, two major causes of loneliness seem possible. One is that societies throughout the world have embraced a culture of individualism. More people are living alone, and aging alone, than ever. Neoliberal social policies have turned workers into precarious free agents, and when jobs disappear, […]

The Law doesn’t protect people. People protect the law. People have always detested evil and sought out a righteous way of living. Their feelings… The accumulation of those people’s feelings are the law. They’re neither the provisions nor the system. They are the fragile and irreplaceable feelings that everyone carries in their hearts Compared to […]

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Anxiety about loneliness is a common feature of modern societies. Today, two major causes of loneliness seem possible. One is that societies throughout the world have embraced a culture of individualism. More people are living alone, and aging alone, than ever. Neoliberal social policies have turned workers into precarious free agents, and when jobs disappea […]

The Law doesn’t protect people. People protect the law. People have always detested evil and sought out a righteous way of living. Their feelings… The accumulation of those people’s feelings are the law. They’re neither the provisions nor the system. They are the fragile and irreplaceable feelings that everyone carries in their hearts Compared to […] […]

TRANSLATE

AUTHOR :

WE ARE GOING TO DIE

12 Mei 2014 pukul 20:12

We are going to die, and that makes us the lucky ones. Most people are never going to die because they are never going to be born.

The potential people who could have been here in my place but who will in fact never see the light of day and outnumber the sand grains of Arabia or sahara, maybe in the beach.

Certainly those unborn ghosts include greater poets than Keats, Poe, Mark Twain, scientists greater than Newton. We know this because the set of possible people allowed by our DNA so massively exceeds or outnumber the set of actual people. In the teeth of these stupefying odds it is you and I, in our ordinariness, that are here.

We live on a planet that is all but perfect for our kind of life: not too warm and not too cold, basking in kindly sunshine, softly watered; a gently spinning, green and gold harvest festival of a planet.

Yes, and alas, there are deserts and slums; there is starvation and racking misery to be found.

But take a look at the competition.

Compared with most planets this is paradise, and parts of earth are still paradise by any standards.

What are the odds that a planet picked at random would have these complaisant properties?

Even the most optimistic calculation would put it at less than one in a million.

Imagine a spaceship full of sleeping explorers, deep-frozen would-be colonists of some distant world. Perhaps the ship is on a forlorn mission to save the species before an unstoppable comet, like the one that killed the dinosaurs, hits the home planet.

The voyagers go into the deep-freeze soberly reckoning the odds against their spaceship’s ever chancing upon a planet friendly to life.

If one in a million planets is suitable at best, and it takes centuries to travel from each star to the next, the spaceship is pathetically unlikely to find a tolerable, let alone safe, haven for its sleeping cargo.

But imagine that the ship’s robot pilot turns out to be unthinkably lucky.

After millions of years the ship does find a planet capable of sustaining life: a planet of equable temperature, bathed in warm starshine, refreshed by oxygen and water.

The passengers, Rip van Winkles, wake stumbling into the light.

After a million years of sleep, here is a whole new fertile globe, a lush planet of warm pastures, sparkling streams and waterfalls, a world bountiful with creatures, darting through alien green felicity.

the story asks for too much luck; it would never happen. And yet, isn’t that what has happened to each one of us?

We have woken after hundreds of millions of years asleep, defying astronomical odds.

Admittedly we didn’t arrive by spaceship, we arrived by being born, and we didn’t burst conscious into the world but accumulated awareness gradually through babyhood. The fact that we slowly apprehend our world, rather than suddenly discover it, should not subtract from its wonder.

After sleeping through a hundred million centuries we have finally opened our eyes on a sumptuous planet, sparkling with colour, bountiful with life. Within decades we must close our eyes again.

Isn’t it a noble, an enlightened way of spending our brief time in the sun, to work at understanding the universe and how we have come to wake up in it? This is how I answer when I am asked — as I am surprisingly often — why I bother to get up in the mornings. To put it the other way round, isn’t it sad to go to your grave without ever wondering why you were born? Who, with such a thought, would not spring from bed, eager to resume discovering the world and rejoicing to be a part of it?

It is no accident that our kind of life finds itself on a planet whose temperature, rainfall and everything else are exactly right. If the planet were suitable for another kind of life, it is that other kind of life that would have evolved here. But we as individuals are still hugely blessed. Privileged, and not just privileged to enjoy our planet.

More, we are granted the opportunity to understand why our eyes are open, and why they see what they do, in the short time before they close for ever.